Following the events surrounding Afghanistan, it is getting more challenging as Ukraine heats-up and reporters get less access to events across the country. After six months of rule by the illegal Taliban-Haqqani terrorist regime, there is little progress to show for all the diplomatic engagement, and Afghans continue to live in fear of abduction and murder.
Most recently diplomats from the Arab Gulf, the EU, and China have been meeting with the Taliban in failed attempts at making positive changes; while unfortunately raising the prestige of the Taliban regime. As predicted, Pakistan continues to ask the world daily to recognize their puppet regime as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
Meanwhile Afghans continue to suffer under the Taliban rifles and report the cruelties and human rights violations of the regime. From raids on stores selling valentine’s gifts, to abductions of reporters and human rights champions, the Taliban-Haqqani regime continues to violate norms of modern society. Their off-the-books prisons are one area that human rights groups and the UN need to give more immediate scrutiny.
Off-The-Books Prisons
Afghans are raising the alarm about a series of black-sites being used by the terrorist regime as “centers of medieval crime and torture of young people.”
Sources have so far identified about 40 Taliban hidden prisons in Afghanistan. Currently, the media has no access to these sites. The most notorious and feared of these torture sites is not surprisingly in the Panjshir Valley.
Local sources are reporting that these informal prisons operate in nearly every province and some provinces have two locations. Kabul itself has at least three of these black-sites. Prisoners are being brutally and inhumanely tortured just as they were in Iraq and Syria by ISIS.
These prisons are run by the Haqqani Terrorist Network. Some of the prisons are possibly being shared with foreign terrorists as well, to torture their captives. They are holding Afghans and non-Afghans in the facilities and are staffed with Arabic, English, Persian, and Pashto translators.
Some of the abductors are being accompanied by their Taliban allies at night checkpoints when they are hunting in Kabul as they are unable to speak national languages to search for specific Afghan citizens they have identified for capture.
The abduction and detention of these prisoners mostly occurs between 8pm to 5am to avoid the spotlight of the press and cut down on the number of witnesses. To make it harder to locate high-profile persons, all special and sensitive prisoners are transferred from one province to another periodically.
For those lucky enough to survive detention and torture, the jailers issue the prisoners a letter stating that, “the prisoner and his family will not complain to any authority in the future, otherwise they will be severely punished.”
Before the next diplomat meets with the Taliban-Haqqani terror group in a 5-star hotel, maybe they should demand that all torture centers be closed, and that all prisons allow access by humanitarian groups and the press. Meeting with the Taliban-Haqqani regime at this point is only giving them less incentive to modify their behavior. The Taliban continue to get everything they want from diplomats while the Afghan people fall further into despair, fear, and crisis. Now is the time for a full-scale investigation by Amnesty International, UNAMA, Human Rights Watch, the Red Cross – Red Crescent and other human rights organizations.
